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Well, the time has finally come. I’m shifting over to a new website! From this point on I will be posting to www.markrjohnsongames.com, which has a snazzy custom layout for which I must give my strongest possible thanks to my outstanding website designer, NerdCloud. You will notice I have moved just a handful of blog entries over there; the ones I have shifted are some of the blog posts I’m proudest of, and I also just wanted a foundation of blog posts that I could build on, rather than starting from scratch. A big part of this shift was restructuring what goes on the sidebar to make things a lot clearer, to put my academic work at the front rather than my game design work (as it is, by far, the more central part of what I “do” at the moment), and to build a website that would last me indefinitely and not buckle under the pressure. When I first started this site I didn’t really plan for something five years ahead, with tens of thousands of downloads, hundreds of blog posts, thousands of comments, over a million hits – and the site is showing its age! On the new site I have both built it to last (or rather, paid people who know what they are doing to build it to last…) and paid for a lot of services on the side to keep everything running as smoothly as possible. It’s an investment, ultimately, and one that I feel very confident will pay off.

As part of this move, I am very excited to announce that I am going to start writing monthly blog posts again, with this (and the “New Website!” blog post on the new site) being August’s posts. At this point I feel confident that I can commit to monthly blog posts without too much hassle. They might not be long, and they might just be updates on what I’ve been doing rather than any kind of analysis or commentary or devlog in their own right, but I want to get back to actually putting content out there on a speedier timescale than academic publishing. I think it’s also important for starting to get the SEO of the new site up to the level of this one; it’s a dull tedious job, of course, but one that I think is very important.

As for what will happen to this site? Well, in a couple of months I’m going to post an “everything has moved to the new website” post here, and then leave that at the top of the blog as a placeholder. Beyond that, I intend to maintain this site for some time, but perhaps not indefinitely; I might also change it to a site that simply redirects to the new site or something of that sort. Most likely I’ll change it to a big banner for URR, and then a hyperlink that sends you to the new site; I’ll then archive everything here, maybe re-post some of my other favourite blog posts from time to time. Or, of course, I might just leave this as it is, but reduce the upkeep I’m paying on the thing. I’m not sure… but either way, this is the penultimate blog post to ever appear on this website.

I first began this site when I started my PhD, and it has seen me through a doctorate, several postdocs, learning to code, building URR, a life-destroying illness/event, writing a book, getting fit, getting un-fit, moving 4000 miles away to a new country, and starting to get fit again. I have to confess, in the process of writing this post, I am getting more than a little emotional. This website has come to mean a lot to me, although no where near as much as all of you who read it. I’ve had this site for so many years, and we’ve gone through so much “together”, that it honestly feels like a part of myself and my identity more than a collection of pixels and bytes on the internet. But it is time to move to a new digital home: one slicker and newer, faster and response, more appropriate to what I do, and more completely built to last the test of time. I love how the new site looks, and I know before too long I’m going to feel just as comfortable there as I do here. I can’t wait to see all of you there, and start properly rebuilding this amazing community that means so much to me.

Thanks again for everything, everyone, and I’ll see you on the new site.

…for the first time in around nine months, and it felt pretty damned good, honestly. I’m not setting deadlines, I’m not pushing myself, I have no expectations other than making an interesting game. And slowly, but surely, a bit more of that has now taken place. I’ve probably done around twenty hours of coding in the last three weeks. A lot of that was figuring out what everything means and how everything pieces together, but I’ve done some work on the conversation system, and a bit of work fixing a bunch of bugs, too. Feels good. And more importantly, I’ve broken the mental barrier I had about “getting back” to programming after so long away, especially on such a big project, and especially when other stuff, i.e. academic work, now flows so smoothly and so easily out of my brain. But yeah: feels great to be “back”, albeit in a small, cautious way, and without any deadlines, or sense of pressure, or anything like that.

On an unrelated note, the new website is now almost finished, and I am ridiculously happy with how it looks. My designer has gone above and beyond what I expected or hoped for, and all being well, everything will be shifting over to there in the not-too-distant future. On the health front, things have improved markedly on both the physical and psychological levels (hence why I’ve been able to do a bit of coding), and I’m thinking through some serious life changes I think to overall be in a stronger place. Thanks, as ever, for sticking with me, everyone: it isn’t over just yet.

Hello everybody – my thanks, as ever, for being patient whilst this next update finds its way on to the internet. I’m sorry there was no February or March update; these turned into yet more hard months, mainly for health reasons, and finding the time and more importantly the mental space to sit down and type out a thousand words about this kind of stuff was surprisingly hard. However, as of now I have four main things to update you all on:

Health

So, my health has been less-than-great in the last few months since the previous update. On the plus side, the complication I discussed in previous posts seems to have faded away, and has just become something to keep an eye on. Naturally the complication has seriously boosted my several stress and misery levels, but right now it isn’t causing too many issues. Far more worrying is the fact that a month and a half ago, I got a symptom of the thing that almost killed me four years ago for the first time (this first sign being a particular kind of pain/discomfort). This, as I’m sure you can appreciate, is a strong emotional trigger for me, and I have not been in a good place these past few weeks. I now have to wait at least another month or two in order to see whether or not any more symptoms develop, or whether it was/is “just” a false alarm. That said, this new symptom itself has faded, which is either a good sign (it means nothing) or a bad sign (the first symptom also faded last time before the deadly symptoms kicked in), but the lack of being constantly reminded of it has meant I’ve been able to actually get stuff done. However, I want to add that I have deeply appreciated the support I’ve got here, on Twitter, and elsewhere, especially from others with serious or long-term medical issues. It really has meant a huge amount to me. So: hopefully this will the end of it, no more symptoms will appear, a month or two from now I can be confident the disease hasn’t returned, and can, again, start to properly get back on my feet. If not… then we’ll have to see.

Work

In times when I’ve been able to think straight, work has been going well. The University of Alberta has proven to be a really great working environment, both in terms of people and in terms of the practical, everyday structuring of work – which is to say, nobody minds if I work from home, or in a cafe, rather than from my office. I’m now a good 25% of the way through developing and writing my next book, and all that has just been sent off to the publisher we (my co-author and I) want to work with for the project. Once the contract is handled, I’ll be able to actually announce it a little more “formally” than I’ve been doing so far; it’s about streaming, and I can’t wait to show the outline to you all. I also have more several papers coming out soon, which will be posted here (and the new site) as and when: one about analysing crosswords and other paper puzzle games from the perspective of understanding them as pre-digital “casual games”; one about cheating in card games within casinos; one about depictions of “deep play” in cinema, so films like Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, Would You Rather, Saw, 13 Tzameti, etc;and at least two more on Twitch and live streaming (focused around disabilities and mental health, and emotional labour, respectively). More soon on this front…

Game Dev

In the last few weeks, for pretty much the first time since my health took such a serious downtown around August last year, I’ve actually opened up the URR file, taken a look around, familiarised myself with it a little bit, and started to figure out what precisely needs doing to get the 0.8 release out. As ever, it remains achingly close to completion; I need some more time on the conversation system, then some bug-fixing, and then we’re done. I still hope for a return in April, assuming my health does not take a turn for the, er, even worse. However, as I’ve said before, it just can’t be a priority for me at the moment, as much as I wish it could, but hopefully, finally, things might change soon. I hate how much this is dragging on, and I hate how much the project has floundered; but life is very tough at the moment.

New Website

I’ve started the development work on a new website (one does, after all, have to proceed on the assumption that one will live to a normal age, right?) and I’m pleased with some ideas that have been coming together. As before, the plan is still to create a new website to combine my academic and game dev stuff, and also to deal with some of the issues on this site. When I set up this website I didn’t really know what I was doing, and now the site is really beginning to buckle under its own weight. Frankly, I lack both the technical ability and the spare mental space to fix it, despite the very patient replies from my hosting company’s customer support. For that reason as well, it’s time to move to a new site. On this note: if anyone reading this knows of an experienced website designer with a good body of work I can look at (even better if they make games-related websites), so let me know. The new website is probably going to be WordPress again, but I’m looking to pay for a totally custom layout. If you know anyone who might be interested in this work – and also design work on two other websites for work projects – do let me know. All will obviously be paid!

Next

In the next couple of months I have quite a few engagements coming up; after two-thirds of a year of illness and not really having the strength to travel (although moving country obviously didn’t help), it’s good to be getting out there again. I’m off to a conference in Canada in mid-April to talk about disclosure statements in video game reviews, then I’m Skyping into a UK conference to talk about Twitch streamers and moderators, after which in late April I’ve been invited to speak at the Rio Esports Forum on the labour of the Esports career, then a talk here in Edmonton in early-May on videogames-and-gambling, and finally a Skype into Prague to talk about Esports cheating and game integrity. My health issues have really meant I just haven’t had the time nor the strength to do any of these things, but with the potential improvements above, I’m in a slightly better place now and strong enough to resume some wider dissemination and engagement. But still – the last eight months have been rough, and in many ways have pushed me back to a place I thought and hoped I’d left behind years ago. As ever, my profound appreciation goes out to all those who read this blog – hopefully the rest of 2018 will continue to pick up. I do hope you are all well, and I’ll update you all again soon, hopefully in the much nearer future than this time…

And thus ends 2017: all things considered, a rather disappointing year.

Looking back, it was probably the third worst year of my life (the worst being 2013 when I developed my chronic illness, the second worst being 2014 when I was coming to terms with it). I spent half of 2017 in a deeply toxic working environment which had a significant effect on my mental and physical health. I managed to get out, but became completely burned out from writing my book, and after that a complication from the life-threatening illness/injury/trauma of 2013 developed, and triggered a profound change in my emotional and mental well-being, which – six months on, and a very tough six months it has been – I’m finally now starting to get something of a handle on. As long as nothing else happens (I’m too young for this shit, frankly), I think I’m on the road to recovery now. I’m now settled in Canada, working in a great environment and enjoying being in a great new relationship, and these are damned good foundations for getting everything else back on track.

So, what did get done in 2017, and what will get done in 2018? Well:

2017

Finished My First Book. Much of the first half of this year was spent finishing my upcoming first book, The Unpredictability of Gameplay, which is now officially “in press”. Situated somewhere between game studies, game design, and a number of wider engagements with the history of play, various kinds of gambling, and a range of other elements, the volume seeks to develop a framework for thinking through the different “kinds” of unpredictability that exist in games, and in turn to explore a number of interesting cultures or implementations of unpredictability (procedural content generation being one of the case studies!). It was a challenging task this year to write it, which definitely contributed significantly to my burnout, but I’m very happy with the final product. More will appear here about the book once we have a fixed publication date, but with my first ever monograph completed, it’s definitely one of my big successes of 2017.

Almost Finished 0.8. So it didn’t get finished, but a lot of extra work did get done, and it is closer to release than it was a year ago. The NPCs are basically finished, the conversation system is basically finished; this release has been a huge task, and far bigger than I ever imagined, but I’m pleased with what I got done in 2017, even if it wasn’t as much as I hoped. In the extremely difficult circumstances throughout the year, I’m happy with the coding I managed.

Moved To Canada. In 2017 I finally moved out of my home country of the UK and have now settled in Edmonton up in northern Canada, where I now work at the University of Alberta. Moving oneself 4,200 miles away is not just a major practical effort in terms of the transporting of objects, booking of flights, and all that, but also a tremendous administrative one – whereas administrative things build up piecemeal when living in one’s native country, moving to a new country means that one has to do everything, from health to housing from insurance to payment from bank accounts to mobile phones, all at the same time. This is then further complicated by the fact that some of these are contingent on some of the others, making the entire task quite dreadfully confusing. Nevertheless, this is now all done, and I’m comfortably settled in here; this was a big task which was simultaneously exciting and daunting, and I’m glad it’s done.

Wrote Many Many Papers and Chapters. Ordinarily I wouldn’t class this as an “achievement”, being just the standard activity of a (young) academic, but in such a hard year I feel that it is actually worth mentioning. I got out around four journal papers and at least that many book chapters – here’s a quick list of them, and some links for where you can read them if you’re interested.

“It’s like the gold rush”: the lives and careers of professional video game streamers on Twitch.tv. This paper is the first paper to emerge from my ongoing research project into Twitch, and focuses on the experiences of professionals at becoming professionals, being professionals, and how this status changes and reshapes their lives.

Gamification: What it is, and how to fight it. This paper was co-authored with my colleague Jamie Woodcock, who I will also be co-authoring my second book with, and in it we explored two different kinds of gamification, how to fight against the mainstream of gamification, and what a “true” gamification really looks like.

Gaming-value and culture-value: understanding how players account for video game purchases.This paper was co-authored with Yinyi Luo, a late-stage doctoral student and good friend, in which we examined why people pay for pre-order and why people buy games on Steam sales (and the like) with no intention of ever actually playing them.

Making science fiction real: neoliberalism, real-life and esports in Eve Online. This paper was published just a day or two before the end of the year, and examines some of the ideological content of Eve Online, how playing Eve affects the “real-world” lives of its players, and Eve’s esports competitions!

If you don’t have University access, some of them are already available on my academia.edu page, and the others will be in the next few days. Finally, alongside these papers, I also worked on a lot of book chapters; here are some of the books I either wrote something for in 2017 (to be published in 2018), or had published in 2017:

As above; although it’s standard practice for my job, in such a hard year, I’m glad I still managed to get out such a large volume of work. Quite a few papers I wanted to write didn’t get finished, but more than enough were.

2018

In previous years I’ve almost always met the lofty goals I’ve set myself, but for 2018, I’m going to tone it down a little, and focus on a small number of essential things. There are only really a few core “output” goals I have (I’m not including goals here like spending time with my new partner, keeping fit and healthy, that kind of stuff, and nor am I including publishing papers, as that’s just a normal part of the academic life). But, nevertheless, I have four major objectives for 2018:

Release 0.8. This has to be done. It has been 90% finished for a year now, and it’s just getting ridiculous. My intention is to dedicate a significant block of March and April to getting 0.8 done, polished, bug-fixed, and finally released, and then I’ll be taking stock of my longer-term game design goals after that.

New Website. I think the time has come to move to a new website which more accurately reflects everything I do instead of just URR (especially as it is a smaller part of my time now than a year ago), and one with a new custom wordpress layout. I’m looking at a few possible domain names right now, but I’m pretty sure I know which one I’m going to settle on. This is an objective for some time around May or June or so this year, when I want to begin shifting everything over there. With URR becoming less of my focus, and my academic work becoming more of my focus, it seems strange to keep this as my domain name, honestly. Equally, it is a difficult one for people to read and make sense of, it’s difficult for people to say, and so forth, and I’ve run into this issue now more times than I can count. For the same reason, my Twitter account is now @mrj_games instead of my old account name, for this is both a more general handle, and a more easily-conveyed one as well. More on this in the next few months, but by the end of 2018 – hopefully more like the middle of 2018, but let’s see! – everything will be moved over there.

New Blog. Closely related to the above – as well as a new website that reflects more accurately my broader games interests, it is also time to reshape “the blog” in a similar way. There are two ways the blog will be reshaped, and two reasons for it. Firstly, the blog will continue to shift from a “dev blog” into a “dev and general games commentary blog”, and secondly, the blog will shift from a “weekly” blog into a “monthly” blog, and one without fixed monthly deadlines; a post will appear some time in each month, without precise timings enforced up-front.

The reasons for these changes are twofold. In the first case, although URR remains an active-project-on-hiatus and not an abandoned project, my academic games work is my central focus now, and will be indefinitely. This means my blog should reflect this, and should reflect what I’m spending most of my “games time” doing. In the second case, once the blog update schedule drifted away from weekly in 2017, I came to realise how much of a stressful pressure weekly updates had become. When I started the blog they were an exciting, enjoyable thing to look forward to every week, and something to help guide and centre my thoughts, but this is no longer the case. I’m not quite sure when this change took place – as with all gradual things, one only notices it when one is startled out of complacency and compares the present to the distant past – but it definitely did. This means I need a blog update schedule devoid of pressure, but one still with a degree of regularity, and monthly updates are definitely the way to go on that front.

So, as part of the transition to the new website, the shift to the new blog will take place in stages. Stage 1 will be continuing to post here as the new website is acquired and developed; Stage 2 will be co-posting everything on here and the new blog, but with a link over here that points to the new site; and then Stage 3 will be posting everything on the new blog, and putting up a front-page and top-of-blog notice on this site redirecting readers to the new site. From that point on my intention will be to retain this website indefinitely (at least for quite some time) in order to direct interested readers to the new one, but posts will no longer appear here.

So yes: the new blog will be on a new website, will have a monthly update schedule, will cover general games commentary as well as game development, and will hopefully end up looking rather nicer than the present site does right now (not that there’s anything wrong with the WordPress standard, but it’s time for something a little more personalised, don’t you think?). I’m really excited about this relaunch, and there will be more information on it in the coming months.

Finish Book #2. My second book is already well under-way, on a more relaxed schedule than my first, and using a lot of important new knowledge I learned from the first book to help me write the second in a healthier manner. A proper announcement will be coming at some point a little down the line, perhaps once we have a cover to show, but basically the book is about Twitch, live streaming, and the labour politics of the games industry more generally, including that surrounding sponsorship, promotion, games reviewing, and the like. We’re (my co-author and I) currently hoping to have it released some time around the middle of 2019, as there’s a particular deadline we want to meet. Again, more on this soon!

Final Thoughts

So there you go: 2017 wasn’t the best, 2018 will hopefully better, but I’m scaling back on my ambitions in order to build things back up in a more sustainable way for the future. I’m excited for the future after a terrible year, and I hope you all are too. More from me soon!

Hello everyone! It has been a little while since the first Interlude, so I thought it would be appropriate to post a sequel.

Firstly, thank you all somuch for the amazingly kind words on the other entry (and which I’ve had through email, Facebook, etc) – they really mean so much to me, and they are deeply deeply appreciated.

Secondly, I’ve now successfully moved to Canada, found a flat (or rather, an apartment), signed the contract, and done the majority of all the admin and bureaucracy stuff that comes from moving to an entirely different country; I still need to get a mobile phone that functions in this country, and there’s one or two University-admin things I need to complete, but otherwise I’m settled, moved, I’m “in the system” in the Canadian bureaucracy, and I’m getting ready to officially begin this job just a couple of days from now. This has been a pretty huge task in the last fortnight, but it’s now coming to an end.

Thirdly, on the health front, the physical symptoms are improving, and the psychological symptoms are (more slowly) also improving. Things are still tough, but I’m making some good choices to improve the newfound psychological difficulties this complication from my older illness has dumped on me. In the short-to-mid term, I think things might be on the up (slowly), but it’s always so hard to know.

Fourthly, here’s the cover for my upcoming book with Bloomsbury. I’m so happy with the design! I should have more information soon about an exact publication date, but there’s lots of roguelike-y goodness in there to be had.

Fifthly, any of you folks who are interested in Twitch and live streaming might want to read this paper I recently published about it – you can find a paywall-free version here. In it we explore the backgrounds of live streamers, the everyday work and labour of being a professional live streamer, and their hopes and fears about the future of their practice. This is part of a larger project on Twitch I’ve been developing alongside my colleague Jamie Woodcock in the last year, and we should have some more exciting stuff on this front to announce soon. Stay tuned.

So yes, that’s everything for now. I’ll hopefully be able to post more again once I have some kind of stability. I’ve also been thinking over some pretty fundamental questions about the website, how I blog, how often I blog, my general online visibility, these sorts of things, so there might be some big changes coming in the future (once I feel a little stronger). In the mean time, take care, everyone.